I saw the worst bands of my generation
applied by magic marker to dry wall
-- "I Should Be Allowed To Think", They Might Be Giants, John Henry [Ginsberg excerpts used with permission]

The opera's over, and I'm once again stuck with the feelings that A) I never want something to take over my life like that again and yet B) I enjoyed performing a show with a focused group of talented people. In the end I'm glad I did it but I think the costs are starting to outweigh the benefits; I'm still behind on a big project, and I hate being behind. And I had to miss SXSW.

I ain't there yet. To get there I need to catch up on work and make plenty of money so I can take long breaks for such things.

So for the near term (a year? three?), no more shows, and no more time-intensive singing groups. (I might break down and get back into a choir that only meets for 3-4 hours a week, but that's as far as it goes.)

Riverfront Times review of Albert Herring by Harry Weber. (I was in the half of the cast not mentioned by name. Oh well.) It says plenty of nice things ("handsomely acted, beautifully sung"), and his complaints about diction can at least partially be blamed on the performance space, which is built for showing art on walls rather than being sung in. Par for the course.

AG is Free, AG is Free, AG is Free[Mushroom]"In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before," Michael McClure remembered. "We had gone beyond a point of no return--and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void--to the land without poetry--to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."

Allen Ginsberg comments on the 'values' of "Howl":

Ginsberg on "Howl"[The HOWL Project]To call it work of nihilistic rebellion would be to mistake it completely. Its force comes from positive "religious" belief and experience. It offers no "constructive" program in sociological terms--no poem could. It does offer a constructive human value--basically the experience--of the enlightment of mystical experience--without which no society can long exist.